Message of Support to Free Casey Goonan: Free Them All!

“Revolutionary Greetings.

My name is Hybachi LeMar and I’m a member of the Black Autonomy Federation Chicago Local Organizing Committee. I’m sending this message to support the release of scholar activist dedicated community organizer and friend Casey Goonan.

When I was houseless, he let me eat and sleep in his home. Each morning we asked each other, “What’s your positive affirmation for the day?” We take a meaningful moment before sharing a positive truth, both of us knowing it’s significance in our lives when we internalize it as an instrument of our liberation. More often than not, for the years I’ve known Casey, he’s neglecting his own needs to prioritize those of others, has led me to ask him instinctively, if he’s taken his meds yet. And I’ve lost count of how many times he thanked me for reminding him before asking if I remembered to take mine too.

With barely anything in his pocket, I watched him fill a perfect stranger’s diabetic medication prescription. He’s loved, and I don’t mean by me, but by street walkers and other commoners throughout Chicago.

He’s organized fundraisers in one particular area of the city on several occasions. We’d pass out $20 bills he prefilled in envelopes, for every single houseless person on the street, or asking for change. From one corner to the next, up one gentrified block and up another, not letting him know the contents, or lingering around for thanks; often with the clenched fist of unity and a solidarity smile.
It was heartwarming to hand out gloves, masks, hygiene supplies like cases of hand sanitizer, chips, and other community needs for free, under the el train one blistering winter amidst the pandemic from a makeshift warming center he’d open each weekend. A smile on people’s faces glow from appreciation, from those of us who know him, to the newcomers asking ‘And this is for free?’ when glancing at the fold-out tables, not far from the turnstile.
“Mm-hmm! Yep! Help yourself,” Casey responds, wishing them a good day and to take care, which is substantial to folks rendered socio-economically invisible in the city.
Free, the root word in freedom, has been top priority as an agenda item for Casey from dusk til dawn every day of every year that I’ve known him.
He likes to remind everyone how special we are in this world, by showing how easy and necessary it is to care for each other, and to help a world that could certainly use it, offering a space and a table of togetherness, and free education.
As a publisher, he provides an invaluable resource for writers. With freedom inspired by billions of us, it speaks not only to our conscious, but to our collective benefit to know we’re substantially freer in this world with him inside it. We, particularly poor folk throughout the city, appreciate him.

The socio-economically engineered gentrification spiraling genocide by poverty in Chicago’s northside has been as politically protracted as an alienated southside housing project he helped me leaflet. His spirit of spending his last to buy insulin for the diabetic outside the electric doors at Walgreens is the same one alive in the Holy Land 5 that sends medicine and food supplies to orphans in Palestine.

Casey Goonan is a walking model of our aspired-after ideals. A genuine listener, whose aura is evident in the integrity of compassion. His ideals against genocide are shared by me and each of us around the globe who envision a world released from its grip.

Free Casey Goonan! Free Jack Mazurek! Free the Cop City 61! Drop the charges against the Merrimack 4 and the Mountain Valley pipeline defenders! Free the Holy Land Foundation 5! Free Leonard Peltier! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Free Cletus C Rivera! Free them all!

In solidarity with the Columbia University Hind's Hall demonstrators and the CUNY 22.

Love and soli,